ALPHA MAG

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. (AP) —Venus Williamsis getting a wild card into the singles and doubles draws for the BNP Paribas Open next month in the Southern California desert.

The 45-year-old will be making her first appearance in the tournament since 2024, when she lost in the first round as a wild card. She's a three-time semifinalist, most recently in 2018. She boycotted the event between 2002 and 2016 after a controversial incident in 2001.

"It's an honor to award the first wild card of this year's event to Venus Williams," tournament director Tommy Haas said Friday. "Venus is a legend of the game, and one of the most accomplished players our sport has ever seen."

It will be Williams' 10th career appearance in the tournament, which runs March 4-15. A year ago, she was given a wild card, but didn't accept it.

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"I'm so excited to be heading back to Indian Wells and can't wait to return home to play in California," Williams said.

She most recentlycompeted in the Australian Open, losing in the first round in singles and doubles.

Williams is scheduled to compete in the ATX Open, a WTA 250 event in Austin, Texas, that starts Saturday and runs through March 1.

AP tennis:https://apnews.com/hub/tennis

UCLA head coach Mick Cronin issued a long apology Friday, days after hethrew his own player out of a lossfor a hard foul and got into it with a reporter.

Cronin said he directly apologized to center Steven Jamerson II, and that he thought he had committed a dirty play late in East Lansing in the final moments of UCLA's 82-59 loss against Michigan State. Now, after seeing the tape and all of the pushback, Cronin realized that wasn't what had happened.

"It's the only reason I sent him to the locker room," Cronin said, via the SoCal News Group's Aaron Heisen. "I thought he literally made a dirty play and tried to wipe the guy out. … To me, that's a bad play. You can't be down 25 or getting your butt kicked, don't try to take somebody out, hurt somebody on the other team, which is what I thought."

Cronin threw Jamerson out of the game himselfafter Jamerson drilled Michigan State center Carson Cooper on a breakaway dunk late in the blowout loss Tuesday night. Jamerson was called for a foul in the moment, though Cronin wasn't having it.

He called Jamerson over to the bench, grabbed him by his jersey and started walking him off the floor. Jamerson left without much protest.

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"I guess he upgraded that to a Flagrant 2, huh? That's the first time I've [seen] a coach do that," Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo said. "That sounded like Mick, he'll get that straightened out."

Jamerson, a senior, finished with two points and two rebounds in eight minutes. He was hit with a technical foul on the play, as was Cooper for his reaction. Cooper split his free throws for the original foul, which put Michigan State up by 28 points at the time.

After the game, Cronin was still in a terrible mood. He got into it with a reporter who asked him about Michigan State's student section, and then Cronin asked if that reporter was raising his voice at him.

Cronin apologized for his behavior in general Friday, too, and said he needs to "dial back some of my humor" after the wave of criticism he received this week.

"In this climate, you have to be careful with what you say," he said. "Because, I'm a good fit here because I know I'm not bigger than the brand. The brand matters here, the school matters. The last thing I want to do is bring negative publicity to our school.

"Sometimes, because it's not about me, I don't care what people think about me, I need to do a better job knowing, 'Well I am the coach here.' I need to make sure I don't do anything to embarrass our school. For that, I apologize."

Cronin is in his sixth season at UCLA, which started the season No. 12 in the national rankings before falling out completely. Cronin holds a 155-73 record with the Bruins, whom he led to a Final Four in his second campaign with the school.

UCLA now sits at 17-9 this season after back-to-back blowout losses last week. The Bruins will host No. 10 Illinois on Saturday.

CLEVELAND (AP) —Todd Monkenstarted the process of filling out his first coaching staff with theCleveland Brownsby naming his coordinators on Friday.

Browns Monken Football

Travis Switzer was named offensive coordinator, Mike Rutenberg will direct the defense and Byron Storer will be the special teams coordinator.

This is Monken's firstNFLhead coaching job after 11 years as an assistant. He spent the previous three seasons as Baltimore's offensive coordinator.

Switzer was the run game coordinator in Baltimore the past three seasons. During that span, the Ravens led the league in rushing yards (166.9 per game), average rushing yards per carry (5.31) and rushes of 10-plus yards (230).

The Ravens also had the league's top-ranked offense in 2024, becoming the first team in NFL history with at least 4,000 passing and 3,000 rushing yards in a season.

Switzer went to college at Akron and has spent his entire NFL coaching career in Baltimore, starting as an administrative/performance staff assistant in 2017.

It will be the fourth straight season the Browns have had a different offensive coordinator. Monken, however, will call the offensive plays.

Monken and Switzer will need to determine the starting quarterback. The Browns have had a league-high 13 quarterbacks since 2020, including seven over the past two seasons.

Shedeur Sanders started the final seven games, going 3-4. He had a 56.6% completion rate and a 68.1 passer rating with 1,400 passing yards, seven touchdowns and 10 interceptions.

Deshaun Watson has played in only 19 games since being acquired in 2022. He has gone 9-10 as Cleveland's starter with 19 touchdowns, 12 interceptions and an 80.7 passer rating. He did not play in 2025 while rehabbing from a torn Achilles tendon.

Dillon Gabriel, last year's third-round pick who started six games, is also on the roster.

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Rutenberg replacesJim Schwartz, who resigned after being passed over for the head coach opening. Monken said in a statement that Rutenberg has been in systems similar to Schwartz "but not the exact system because Jim was unique."

"They can say attacking style, but then there's attacking style, which is what they've done here up front," Monken said. "I think that background of being a four-down attacking style, but not exact, (and) to add some things that they had done before that I thought would mesh really well with the current staff, was a big part of that."

Schwartz was the architect of one of the league's top defenses the past three seasons. Cleveland led the league in total defense in 2023 and ranked fourth this season as Myles Garrett had 23 sacks andbroke the NFL single-season record.

Garrett was named the NFL Defensive Player of the Year and linebacker Carson Schwesinger the Defensive Rookie of the Year.

Rutenberg — who was Atlanta's defensive pass game coordinator this past season — has 16 years of NFL experience. He came into the league as a player personnel intern and assistant to the head coach in Washington (2003-05) along with stops in Jacksonville (2013-19), San Francisco (2020) and the new York Jets (2021-24).

Storer has coached in the NFL for 12 years, including the past four as the assistant special teams coach in Green Bay. Storer has also coached in Tampa Bay (2010-11), San Diego (2012-13) and the Raiders (2018-21). He stepped way from coaching for four years to help start a new branch of his family's transportation business in San Francisco.

Storer replaces Bubba Ventrone, who was Cleveland's special teams coordinator the past three seasons before heading to the Los Angeles Rams.

Even though the NFL scouting combine begins next week, Monken said during his introductory news conference that there wasn't a deadline to get his entire coaching staff hired.

"I don't control that. I mean we're going to vet as many candidates as we can to get it right," he said. "I think, just like they all vetted for the head coach coaching position, don't get worn out — make sure you get the right people at the start, and that's what we're going to do. So, there is no timeline to get it right."

AP NFL:https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A federal judge has denied the Trump administration's request to delay a Friday deadline torestore an exhibiton the history of slavery at Independence Mall in Philadelphia.

Slavery Exhibit Removed

The ruling Friday morning came as restoration work begun Thursdayresumedat the site of the former President's House. Senior U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe had set a 5 p.m. Friday deadline for its completion, and she held to that timeline, even as the administration appeals her decision.

The Interior Department has said in court papers that it planned to replace the exhibit with its own narrative on slavery, as the administration works to remove information that it deems"disparaging" to Americansfrom federal properties. Rufe said it must work with the city on new material under a longstanding cooperative agreement.

"As this court established, "(t)he government can convey a different message without restraint elsewhere if it so pleases, but it cannot do so to the President's House until it follows the law and consults with the city," Rufe, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, said in Friday's opinion.

In its own filing Friday to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department called her ruling "extraordinary" and "an improper intrusion on the workings of a co-equal branch of government."

The appeals court asked the city to respond to the request for an emergency stay of Rufe's order.

One of the panels being rehung Friday morning — titled "History Lost & Found" — details the surprising discovery of artifacts from the building during an archaeological dig in the early 2000s, as work was being done on a new pavilion for the Liberty Bell.

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National Park Service employees worked with care on the exhibits, including those on the nine people enslaved by George and Martha Washington in the 1790s, when Philadelphia served as the nation's capital. The Park Service describes theoutdoor exhibitas one "that examines the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation."

The Trump administration abruptly removed the panels in January, leading the city and other advocates to file suit. They had been on display since 2010, the result of years of research and collaboration between the city, the Park Service, historians and other private parties.

Rufe, in denying the federal government's request for a delay, said that side was unlikely to succeed at trial. And she said the public –- and the city's reputation -- was being harmed with each passing day.

The city, she said, "is responsible for the public trust in the city's telling of its own history, its own integrity in telling that history, and preventing erasure of that history, particularly in advance of the semiquincentennial."

Millions of people are expected to visit Philadelphia, the nation's birthplace, this year for the 250th anniversary of the country's founding in 1776.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Philadelphia, which is representing the administration in court, declined to comment on the restoration work Friday.

Kimberly Gegner, a teacher from Philadelphia, visited the site Friday with some of her 6th- to 9th-grade students. As a Black American, she said, it had pained her to see the history removed. But she was grateful to see it going back up.

"This whole case and what happened here — the taking it down and how Mayor Parker and other Pennsylvanians had to go to court to have it restored — is an excellent case of how the Constitution was applied to win this case for Philadelphia," she said.

Reuters senior photographer Phil Noble explains how he got the image of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor leaving the police station

Most days, the country's top newspapers have a wide range of photos gracing their front pages. But on Friday, every image topping the British front pages was identical:

A snap ofAndrew Mountbatten-Windsor, slouched in the back of a car, looking shell-shocked on his 66th birthday as he left the police station.

On Thursday, Mountbatten-Windsor became the first member of the UK royal family to bearrestedin modern history, spending more than 10 hours in police custody at a station in the small town of Aylsham, England, about an hour away from his new home on the royal Sandringham Estate.

"The photo gods were on my side yesterday," said Phil Noble, a senior photographer at Reuters news agency who captured the incredible image.

Noble, based in northern England, drove roughly five hours south to Norfolk on Thursday morning – racing to get there after the news of the arrest broke.

Through guesswork and some well-placed sources, his two-person team zeroed in what they thoughtmightbe the correct police station,maybe.There are roughly 20 Thames Valley Police stations where the former prince could have been taken, so they had to wait to see.

"This was probably the fourth or fifth police station that Reuters had visited that night," Noble said. "When I arrived, it didn't look anything out of the ordinary. There was no cars. There was no increased activity."

"To be honest, just before he arrived, I'd left to go back to the hotel… and my colleague Marissa messaged me and said, 'Look, two cars have just arrived I think you should come back,'" Nobel said candidly in a video explaining how he got the shot.

Then the race really began. The Reuters photographer said he "spun the car around, got back, and within a minute of arriving back, the shutters on the garage at the police station came up and two cars left. And one of them, he (Mountbatten-Windsor) was in."

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Stakeout photography has a lot of variables, Noble explained. Part of the job is preparation, skill and experience. It also requires a willingness to stand on the side of a British country road in the dark for hours at a time, without knowing if it will lead to anything noteworthy.

"Probably half an hour before I took the photo, I'd done some test shots of other cars leaving the police station, so I had a rough idea of… the camera settings maybe," explained Noble, who has been working at Reuters for more than 20 years. Before that, he worked in photography at the UK's Press Association and the Manchester Evening News.

"But it's still, you know, more than luck than judgment when the car comes out. You've got to try and guess where he's sitting, which side of the car is he? Is he in the front? Is he in the back? Will the flash recycle in time?"

He took six frames in all, according to Reuters. Two were blank, one was out of focus and two showed police officers. But one captured the extraordinary moment.

"For every car shot that you do, the hit rate is really, really low," he added. "So last night was, it was one of those, kind of, pinch-me moments where you look at the back of the camera, you're tired, it's been a long day… you can't believe that you've got him."

Mountbatten-Windsor wasreleased "under investigation"late Thursday evening. Police have not said what led them to arrest the former prince on suspicion of misconduct in public office, but he previously spent a decade as UK trade envoy starting in 2001. He stepped down in 2011 after coming under fire over his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The former prince has not publicly responded to the latest allegations to emerge after the US Department of Justice released millions of documents related to Epstein. Mountbatten-Windsor has repeatedly denied all allegations of wrongdoing and said he never witnessed or suspected any of the behavior that Epstein was accused of.

Asked about the photo, Noble said it's no work of art, but it's definitely among the most newsworthy he has ever snapped.

"Best photo-photo? It's probably not. You know, it's a man shot at night through the back of a windscreen," Noble said, laughing a bit. "Is that the best photo I've ever taken? No. Is it up there with one of the most important? A hundred percent."

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The U.S. is close to reaching at least 1,000 measles cases for the third time in eight years.

At least 72 new measles cases have been confirmed in the last week, according to updated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So far this year, there have been total of 982 cases in 26 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

New map shows how to spot the measles risk level in your ZIP code

Just six measles cases were reported among international travelers so far this year, according to CDC data.

About 94% of cases are among people who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown, the CDC said.

Meanwhile, 3% of cases are among those who have received just one dose of the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and 4% of cases are among those who received the recommended two doses, according to the CDC.

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The current measles situation in the U.S. is partly being driven by a large outbreak in South Carolina that began last year, with 962 cases recorded as of Friday, according tostate health officials.

Last year, the U.S. recorded 2,281 measles cases, which is the highest number of national cases in 33 years, according to the CDC.

It also marked the first U.S. deaths recorded from measles in a decade,two among school-aged unvaccinated childrenin Texas anda third among an unvaccinated adultin New Mexico.

The CDC currentlyrecommendspeople receive two doses of the MMR vaccine, the first at ages 12 to 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years old. One dose is 93% effective, and two doses are 97% effective against measles, the CDC said.

However, federal data shows vaccination rates have been lagging in recent years. During the 2024-2025 school year,92.5% of kindergartners received the MMR vaccine, according to data. This is lower than the 92.7% seen in the previous school year and the 95.2% seen in the 2019-2020 school year, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last month marked one year since a measles outbreak began in West Texas, with infections soon spreading to neighboring counties and other states.

Public health expertspreviously told ABC Newsthat if cases in other states are found to be linked to the cases in Texas, it would mean the virus has been spreading for a year, which could lead to a loss of elimination status.

When Michael Penix Jr. is healthy, the Atlanta Falcons expect him to be prominent in the team's quarterback pecking order. Until then, team president Matt Ryan plans to make sure the third-year passer has plenty of support from a new coaching staff.

In comments to Sirius/XM Radio about the cloudy future at quarterback, Ryan attempted to shed light on the team perspective. He initially backed away from a full commitment to Penix in his opening press conference in Atlanta, but Ryan implied the 2024 first-round pick wasn't going anywhere.

"How do you help him improve? No. 1, it starts with surrounding him with really solid coaches," Ryan said. "I'm excited about Alex Van Pelt coming in. He's a good football coach. Coming in, you talk about the wealth of experience that he has for a young player like Michael. I think that's really good. You go to the fundamentals; to me, it always comes down to the fundamentals. Do we start with our feet? I know in that interview process, Alex is going to hammer the footwork and going to hammer getting the basics right. So, it starts with the basics.

"Michael does a great job. He can spin the football. We're excited about what he does and we're excited about the staff we're putting around him."

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Penix played in nine games before he tore his ACL, an injury that is all too familiar, as is the recovery and rehab to follow. Penix, determined to get back sooner than projected from his third knee reconstruction surgery, said in early February he's "a little bit" ahead of schedule and expects to be ready for the first game of the 2026 season.

"Michael does a great job. He can spin the football," Ryan said. "We're excited about what he does and we're excited about the staff we're putting around him."

With Penix on injured reserve watching Kirk Cousins operate the offense, the Falcons missed the playoffs and finished 8-9. Since then, head coach Raheem Morris was fired, the Falcons overhauled their front office and hired Ryan as team president. He went with former Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski in Atlanta's wide-ranging search, which multiplied questions about what the Falcons might do behind center.

Cousins is expected to be released if he doesn't retire by the third day of the new league year (March 13). He agreed to modify the final two seasons of a four-year, $180 million deal that lowered his 2026 base salary from a non-guaranteed $35 million to just $2.1 million. The difference of $32.9 million matches the increase of his 2027 salary. Cousins, who has a no-trade clause, still has a guaranteed $10 million roster bonus for 2026.

--Field Level Media